Holy Frikkin’ Laser!

Well, the K40-III 40W laser arrived! I bought it on ebay from a seller called ‘rumei-shopping’. $853 bucks later (+$53 for brokerage and taxes) and Fedex dropped it off this afternoon for me to play with.

The packaging that they did was fantastic. Well padded with 4+ inches of foam and bubble wrap around the entire thing.

It took a bit of cutting and pulling to finally get the laser out of the packing!

The X-Y table is looking good. Moves nice and smooth once I untied the ribbons.

40W laser tube looked good also. They pad it pretty well. Nice!

The control compartment is reasonably neat and tidy. Nothing loose or unconnected.

Ah, the Moshi MS10105 that I’ve heard horror stories of. Well… I suppose that the stories had been more about the crazy USB lockdown that they’ve done between the software and this board. The PCB itself looks pretty good. Not great alignment between this board and the USB connector hole though. 😉 And why the heck are they using a usb master plug? Don’t want to be losing that cable they provide I guess!

So, fired that baby up after filling up a bucket with water and ran a sample engrave using one of the drawings that they provide. Moshidraw looked to be pretty basic to use. Position the laser, set the speed, step-over, etc… and then hit go. Piece of cake. No obvious sign of how to turn it into cut mode. I’ll have to dig through their manual I guess.

I took a video of that first run and jammed it on Youtube. Looks like I need to get my hands on some laser transparencies now so I can start cutting PCB stencils!

We have the exact same model. I just modded the panel with some more safety features. It is residing at the hackerspace right now, and I don’t want anyone to hurt themselves. I find that Moshidraw has some quirks I still need to work out. My next step is to add air assist and Corel Draw to try out the linking btwn the two different softwares. If that fails the control board is getting ditched for a better one.

Thanks for the review. I’m looking at getting one of these too, but will probably mod it with the LAOS laser board, an open source controller for laser cutters. Your pictures of the controller board are very helpful, makes me more confident in making the mod. Will be adding a nice LCD screen to it too. The board is worth a look, turns it into an actual network printer. Just waiting for the PCBs to turn up.

Just a quick question. Is there just the one ribbon cable for controlling the laser/steppers, and the molex for power? I’ve a feeling that there are lots of different types of boards, but hoping that if I look at enough of them and they all look mod-able, I should be fine! 🙂